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3. Simple GUI interfaces: LabVIEW. Next year we will have LabVIEW 2009, with the addition of some nice features like snippets.
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I will check this link out, but as for simple GUI interfaces, I have never found Labview code easy to read. Maybe its because I am used to text programming and think in pseudocode to begin with, but I have always found it easier to follow steps right down a page. I look at Labview flowcharts and my brain just freezes. There are just too many icons that don't mean anything to me. Where with text code I can at least recognize a word.
This is a problem I recognize, especially with people moving toward GUI stuff more and more everyday, that I am trying to remedy, but it is hard to "grok" once you've worn other coding tracks into your brain. It why I also have a hard time getting my head around object oriented programming, because when I learned everything was straight down the page and easy to follow. I mean I learned on FORTRAN and still use it and Visual Basic day to day. Most of the new stuff I do is written for VBA because everyone has Excel.
I'm just saying that just because some people can follow flowcharts easier doesn't mean everyone can. People all have different thought methods and I like that FIRST maintains all 3 code bases to support whatever your thought model is. And there is something that just gripes my open source heart when LabView is a 3rd party proprietary language when C++ and Java have free development environments. I think that whatever coding would come out of an all autonomous task would need to be useable by both types of coders, grapical and text based.
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sircedric4, I do think one of the problems you're running into is people not understanding the fun, importantness, or awesomeness of programming. Often it can be hard to convey, because people assume it's simply geeky. People have streams of thought, and so do robots. If they can describe each decision the robot will make, then that's half the programming. It's like giving someone a set of instructions, but that person only knows what it's been told, and what it is told by the sensors you put on the robot.
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You are right here, and its something I try to convey to my students, but getting the students to make a decision isn't always easy. I don't know if its reverse peer pressure and those that are really into it are afraid to shine and speak up or what. High school is a pressure cooker, seeing the difference in maturity level between a freshman and a senior, so it can be hard to get new information into their already overworked brains. :-) It's a lot of fun seeing the students change though as they become more aware of what they are capable of. I am hoping since I finally have some younger students and not just all seniors on their way out that some will grow into liking programming once they've been exposed to it and how important it is.
I imagine each team has to fight with attrition and changing high school environments and students, so once again I can't see a way to do full autonomous without some locked up, easy to understand, and pre-canned repository. We all live in a real world environment, with different resources, and I think from looking at the Regionals, this is a huge undertaking. Worthy for the teams who can do it, but as a game design goal I hesitate to try it.